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Although it looks like a lot, there are actually only five things in any room: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

— How to Keep House While Drowning by Kc Davis, Dr Martin

The neglect of infrastructural systems can be weaponized. In 2018, there were reports of outbreaks of waterborne diseases, including typhoid, hepatitis A, and dysentery, in areas of Syria where the population was considered to be hostile to the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s military strategy for this region included not just conventional warfare but also arresting water treatment plant engineers and maintenance staff, as well as withholding the chlorine needed to treat water supplies—biological warfare by the expedient of making sure that the quiet, daily work of operations and maintenance didn’t take place.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra

Because much of the survival labor they replace (like obtaining clean water or fuel for cooking) is highly gendered, the role of these systems in underpinning agency, including economic agency, can be especially profound for women. I think it’s probably not a coincidence that the women’s suffrage movements in the UK, U.S., and Canada all grew alongside water, sewage, utility gas, and electrical systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a distribution of power in more ways than one.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. . . . Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

— The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle)

In a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”

— Four thousand weeks : time management for mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Joseph Carens, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, argues that this social order—of relatively closed borders, where citizenship is an inherited privilege—has much in common with the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Being born a citizen of a wealthy, industrially developed country like Canada is analogous to being a child of the nobility: regardless of your exact rank or wealth, you are likely to have a life of greater prospects and agency than if you were a peasant. And like feudalism, this seems like an entirely reasonable way of ordering society to most of those who are to the manor born. Carens points out, however, that there is nothing that you can say to the serf in the field that could justify why they have a different lot in life from the nobles.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra

Feelings carry valuable information, so if you deny or repress them, you lose that information.

— Search Inside Yourself by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman, Chade-Meng Tan

In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

Train your “lower-level you” with kindness and persistence to build the right habits. I used to think that the upper-level you needed to fight with the lower-level you to gain control, but over time I’ve learned that it is more effective to train that subconscious, emotional you the same way you would teach a child to behave the way you would like him or her to behave—with loving kindness and persistence so that the right habits are acquired.

— Principles by Ray Dalio